JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ALISON PILKINGTON ABOUT THE METHODS AND INFLUENCES UNDERPINNING HER CURRENT BODY OF WORK.

JL: Your paintings seem to combine abstract, diagrammatic and figurative approaches. Are you conscious of having a particular aesthetic in mind, when you embark on a painting?

AP: My aesthetic approach or painting style has evolved a lot over the last ten years or so, particularly since embarking on a practice-based PhD at NCAD, which I started in 2009 and completed in 2015. During this time, I made quite a deliberate break from gestural abstract painting. I think I felt the need to free myself up from a particular style of painting. It is ironic that gestural abstract painting – which is considered such a free and intuitive way of handling paint – was becoming restrictive and stifling for me. By making these deliberate changes, I felt I could explore the medium of painting as an active research process that could have a range of possible outcomes. I wanted to concentrate more on personal narratives and to explore how I might express these narratives through the medium of painting. I also wanted to explore figurative possibilities within the work. This was when I started exploring collage and maquettes as creative prompters for paintings. The work of certain artists, who paved the way for more fluid approaches to painting, have been greatly influential for me in this respect. These include German artist, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), and more contemporary artists such as New York-based abstract painter, Charline Von Heyl, and American painter, Amy Sillman.

JL: Can you briefly outline your PhD inquiry and how this research may have altered your approaches to painting?

AP: As anyone who has undertaken a doctorate will tell you, PhD research is a durational and complex journey. For me, there was a lot of discovery about the ‘why’ more than the ‘how’ of painting – a reflective process that included a rigorous exploration of the medium’s relevance or validity as a research method. There are other avenues related to the research that I would now like to explore further, such as framing the creative process as a radical space for artistic agency – something that relates to my new body of work.

JL: Perhaps you could outline some of your research methods?

AP: My work tends to start with sketches, drawings and watercolour studies. I keep notes, thoughts and ideas in my journals. I love the freedom of drawing in sketchbooks and journals, and I tend to have two or three on the go at any one time. I try to make connections between what I am thinking and writing about in my journals and the images that emerge in the notebooks. Ultimately, the paintings are an extension of this investigative process – an approach that helps me to retain a looseness within my paintings. Rather than making direct painterly copies of my maquettes and collages, I use them as references that can be transformed through the process of painting.

JL: Can you outline some of your art historical influences?

AP: References to painting from different periods of art history frequently come through in my work. Sometimes these associations are made unconsciously, and it is only at some later stage that I might recognise their significance. However, there are some explicit and recurrent references to individual paintings that I consistently find compelling, curious or strange, both in terms of the artist’s approaches to composition, or to the work’s narrative content. A painting by Pietro Longhi, titled Clara the Rhinoceros (1751), has interested me for some time. I have made several paintings that express my fascination with its strangeness and my preoccupation with interpreting its meaning. This was something that I explored at length during my PhD research. Magritte is another important touchstone for my work, based on the artist’s life-long exploration of painting as something ‘inherently mysterious’. Magritte’s oeuvre rendered everyday objects within strange, unfamiliar or uncanny scenes and this is something that has frequently inspired me. I also love paintings from the early seventeenth-century Baroque period, including work by Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Poussin. I try to recreate a bit of their drama in my paintings, through the use of strong light sources, experimentations with scale, and through the suggestion of underlying narratives.

JL: Much of your work displays a preoccupation with depth of field. Can you discuss your paintings in terms of trompe l’oeil and your treatment of surfaces?

AP: I think this grew out of my preoccupation with the specifics of the medium of painting. Such inquiries included an exploration of how the introduction of light often creates shadows and highlights. I’m also interested in how scale and composition can create visual tension within a painting or across an entire body of work. These are the more formal elements of composition, but I try to consider them in tandem with the narratives that that I am developing in the paintings. Making paper maquettes and collages using ‘flat colour’ challenged me to consider the types of brushwork and paint coverage that create impressions of ‘flatness’. Cutting through the paper and folding it back to reveal another layer of colour underneath works on a formal level, while also having symbolic meaning relating to the self – to concealing and revealing parts of the self. It is me attempting to give shape to these thoughts. Much of this exploration started with the maquettes and thinking about the three-dimensional aspect of an object in space. Flaps, holes, tentacles and shadows occurring within these sculptural objects gradually evolved and were transformed through painting.

JL: In your current solo exhibition, ‘How We Roam’, there is a sense that the characters in your paintings are embarking on curious or speculative journeys. Is this a metaphor for the creative process?

AP: It is, yes. There are references to classical portraiture, landscape paintings and the sublime in art history. Many of my paintings depict figures in the wilderness, perhaps conquering the terrain, or having reached the summit of a mountain, as in the painting Wanderer. For me, the idea of a figure roaming the wilderness is undoubtedly a metaphor for the creative process, which can push an artist out of their comfort-zone. It can make us feel vulnerable, as we test out new things, but ultimately the process rewards and re-energises the human spirit. This simple motif is developed across this new series of paintings, which I hope prompts the viewer to ask questions about the work and to be curious.

Alison Pilkington is an artist who lives and works in Dublin. ‘How We Roam’ is currently showing at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon until 2 June and will subsequently be presented at the Ashford Gallery, RHA in September 2018.
alisonpilkington.com

Image credits:
View of Alison Pilkington’s notebook sketches
Alison Pilkington, Wanderer, 2017, oil on canvas
Alison Pilkington, Nature, 2017, oil on canvas

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ALISON PILKINGTON LOOKS AT CURRENT PRACTICES IN IRISH ABSTRACT PAINTING.

“We are all at present, far more divided, less empowered and certainly far less connected to the effects of our world than we should be. It is for this reason that I am deeply involved in the texture of a medium capable of universalizing so much lost intimacy.” ¹

The term ‘abstract painting’ is historical and, over time, the parameters of the genre seem to have collapsed. It could be argued that to write about abstract painting as if it were a genre that has some significant position within contemporary art, might be a somewhat redundant inquiry. The term itself has been debated and contested throughout the history of twentieth century art, with the traditional meaning of abstraction shifting considerably. To say that ‘abstract painting is alive and well’ in current Irish painting practices also seems an outmoded way of summarising what painters do with their material and medium. As described by Briony Fer in her book, On Abstract Art: “As a label, abstract art is on the one hand too all inclusive: it covers a diversity of art and different historical movements that really hold nothing in common except a refusal to figure objects.”²

In tracing the lineage of Irish twentieth century art through the lens of abstraction, it is clear that formalism has been a central artistic concern. Manine Jellet, Patrick Scott, and more recently Sean Scully and Richard Gorman, offer good examples. The ROSC series of exhibitions also had a significant influence on abstract painting in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Whilst appearing to have roots in the formal abstraction of the late 1950s, the practice of the late William McKeown continues to adopt a range of positions in modern painting, utilising elements of installation, abstraction and figuration. McKeown’s work invites the viewer to consider boundaries, both physical and non-physical. Implicit in his work was the artist’s attention to the apparatus of the medium of painting. Suggesting that material supports are integral to viewer engagement with his paintings, McKeown stated that “I want the sense that the oil is in the linen, rather than on the surface”.³

Within the current generation of Irish painters, formal abstraction still has a place, but it is blended with other ideas – beyond pure form and colour – coming from diverse fields such as philosophy, mathematical theory, science and music. Such interdisciplinary influence is evident in the work of numerous contemporary Irish abstract painters such as Ronnie Hughes, Helen Blake and Mark Joyce. These artists have embraced a kind of ‘soft formalism’, where personal interests converge with formal concerns around composition, colour and pattern-making. Helen Blake’s paintings focus on how colour and texture can literally weave a pattern, drawing the viewer into the surface of the painting. The handmade quality of Blake’s paintings leaves space for both accident and design. Pattern-making and structure are similarly evident in the work of Ronnie Hughes, as are his concerns for human and scientific systems. Among other things, Mark Joyce’s paintings make connections between music and colour theory, testing how colour interacts with composition and form.

The intersection of formal concerns with the physical act of mark-making can be further observed in the paintings of Diana Copperwhite and Damien Flood. Though their work could not be considered purely abstract, it “supports the position of the human hand”, to paraphrase American painter John Lasker’s descriptions of his own work.⁴ For Copperwhite and Flood, the gesture of the brush as it moves across the surface and the chance elements that emerge through this action, seem paramount. Furthermore, their work points to the waning importance of a clear division between abstract and figurative painting. The idea that ‘figuration’ and ‘abstraction’ hold conflicting positions within painting appears to be outmoded. It seems that the contemporary painter is no longer restricted either by the formal concerns of abstraction, or the narrative implications of figurative painting.

A more explicit form of deconstruction in painting is evident in the practices of Irish artists Helen O’Leary and Fergus Feehily. In expanding the definition of what makes something a ‘painting’, a blurring of boundaries between ‘object’ and ‘image’ is central to their work. Such ‘bricolage’ approaches to painting can be traced back to the montage works of Kurt Schwitters and other Dada artists.⁵ Attentive to the apparatus of the medium, Helen O’Leary explicitly investigates how paintings are built and the materials involved in their making. She recently stated that her new work “delves into my own history as a painter, rooting in the ruins and failures of my own studio for both subject matter and raw material.” O’Leary frequently disassembles the “wooden structures of previous paintings – the stretchers, panels, and frames”, cutting them back to “rudimentary hand-built slabs of wood, glued and patched together” making “their history of being stapled, splashed with bits of paint, and stapled again to linen clearly evident.”⁶ In contrast to the recycling of older paintings, Fergus Feehily assembles works from found objects and materials. As described by Martin Herbert in his review of Feehily’s 2011 exhibition at Modern Art, London: “Deliberation vs. accident; hard vs. soft; fixity vs. impermanence … There are many paths to the painterly.”⁷

Among recent Irish art graduates, notions of abstraction and figuration appear to be less prominent than engagements with the virtual world. There is a growing sophistication in understandings and navigations of virtual platforms for art making and how these can relate to painting. Such inquiries are evident in the work of emerging artists like Jane Rainey, Kian Benson Bailes and Bassam Al-Sabbah whose imaginary landscapes allude to the digital realm, comprising gliches, screen savers and software imagery. It strikes me that such work could not have been made before the internet. However, it’s not just the aesthetics of digital imagery that have influenced recent painting; the impact of digital tools on the construction of painting has also become increasingly evident. A recent exhibition at The Hole Gallery, New York, titled ‘Post Analog Painting II’ examined how “digital tools have affected our way of thinking” and explored the ways in which the “logic of Photoshop or structure of pixelation shapes a painter’s approach to color, form, light or texture, even when away from their laptops.”⁸

In the early twentieth century, British art historian Clive Bell proposed form and colour as the two principles of formal abstraction, stating that “to appreciate a work of art, we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space”.⁹ Writing candidly about the tensions between representation and abstraction, New York-based painter Amy Sillman asserted that “the real, like the body, is embarrassing: your hand is too moist, your fly is open, there turns out to be something on your nostril, somebody blurts out something that I wasn’t supposed to know, your ex-partner shows up with their new lover (and your work is uncool). But you’re stuck there. That tension is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot, representation peeled away from realness”.¹⁰

For me, these paired statements create a spectrum of ideas that circulate within the complex sphere of abstraction. On one hand, Bell’s description prompts the reader to imagine cool and elegant abstract shapes that are vaguely familiar and comforting, while on the other, Sillmans’s words conjure a kind of brash, dirty abstraction with images that are risky and aesthetically challenging. Perhaps there is something between these two statements that highlights what is so compelling about abstract painting: it communicates something that is so intrinsically known to us, yet is almost impossible to fully articulate. 

Alison Pilkington is an artist who lives and works in Dublin.

Notes

1. Jonathan Lasker interview in Suzanne Hudson, Painting Now, Thames & Hudson, 2015.

2. Briony Fer, On Abstract Art, New Haven and London: Yale University, 1997, p.5.

3. Corinna Lotz, ‘Accepting the Blur’ in, William Mc Keown, IMMA Catalogue, 2008. p. 61.

4. Jonathan Lasker interview in Suzanne Hudson, Painting Now, Thames & Hudson, 2015.

5. Bricolage is a French term which translates roughly as ‘do-it-yourself’.  In an art context, it is applied to artists who use a diverse range of non-traditional art materials. The bricolage approach became popular in the early twentieth century when resources were scarce, with many Surrealist, Dadaist and Cubist works having a bricolage character. However, it was not until the early 1960s, with the formation of the Italian movement Arte Povera, that bricolage took on a political aspect. Arte Povera artists constructed sculptures out of rubbish, in an attempt to bypass the commercialism of the art world, effectively devaluing the art object and asserting the value of ordinary, everyday objects and materials.

6. Sharon Butler, ‘Ideas and Influences: Helen O’Leary’, twocoatsofpaint.com. October 2014.

7. Martin Herbert, ‘Fergus Feehily’, Frieze, October 2011.

8. Raymond Bulman, Post Analog Painting II, exhibition text, The Hole Gallery, New York, 2017. theholenyc.com.

9. Clive Bell, Art, London: Chatto and Windus, 1914, p.115.

10. Amy Sillman ‘Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness’, Frieze, November 2015.

Images used: William McKeown, Untitled, (2009 – 2011), oil on linen, 40.5 x 40.5 cm; Image courtesy The William McKeown Foundation and Kerlin Gallery. Fergus Feehily, Country, 2008 (left); North Star, 2008; courtesy the artist, Misako and Rosen,Tokyo and Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne.

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